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ZBIGNIEW BENEDYKTOWICZ
Photographic Testimony Between and Beyond
Science and Art
We are pleased to present our reader with a
special, quadruple issue of the Konteksty quarterly, which is
also a catalogue to the Malinowski - Witkacy. Photography:
Between Science and Art exhibition. The exhibition's main design
- conceived by our editorial team - the display itself and the
present special issue of Konteksty bring to a head several
topics that our magazine has been investigating for at least three
years.
The first of these concerns Bronislaw
Malinowski's Diaries. In 1997, thanks to our contacts with
Malinowski's daughter, Mrs. Helena Wayne, and the London School of
Economics archives, we began printing Malinowski's hereto
unpublished Diaries (cf: Kontefoty No. 1-2/1997 and
consecutive editions), previously published only in an abridged
English-language edition (A Diary in the Strict Sense of the
Term, New York 1967). Our idea was to publish the complete Diary
in fragments transcribed from the original in successive issues
of Konteksty, in which we hoped to contribute to the
publication of a complete Polish edition of Malinowski's Works, which
has been in preparation for many years
now.
The second topic in question concerned
so-called visual anthropology. For a long time now we have been
paying special attention to the application of
photography and film in anthropological
research, the anthropological dimensions of film and photography and
their links to ethnography (cf: Konteksty No. 3-4/1992 and
No. 3-4/1997).
The third topic concerns the status of
ethnography - an issue which has for some time now been the subject
of heated debates in the anthropological milieu. As a result of
these discussions ethnography is increasingly often branded a "hybrid
discipline" (James Clifford) - a cross between science and art,
an entity existing somewhere between science, art and literature.
The extreme version of this view is that ethnography is neither
science nor art but always an "in-between" discipline.
All the above topics are brought together
in our exhibition's title: Bronisław Malinowski (his photographs
taken during ethnographical trips to the
Trobriand Islands
), Photography (Ethnography) and "between science and art".
There is one more topic, until now not
discussed in depth - but no less complex: the artist Stanisław
Ignacy Witkiewics (Witkacy) and his unconventional approach to, and
application of, photography as a clearly-defined experiment
constituting a part of his diversified creative activity.
Interesting here are Witkiewicz's fascination with photography, the
role of photography in his artistic experience, the shift of
photography towards the opposite pole, and photography as an art.
It so happens that these issues, as well as
the photographic work carried out by both of our exhibition's heroes,
their youthful friendship, their journey together to Australia -
where Witkiewicz was to photograph and draw whatever Malinowski
turned up during his research - the sudden and dramatic break-up of
their friendship, their parting, enhanced by news of the outbreak of
the first world war, finally the impact their friendship and journey
to the tropics had for their work - have been (and continue to be)
described in rich detail - and frequently as a separate entity: on
the one hand by anthropologists, on the other by historians,
literature and art critics and Witkiewicz scholars.
Witkiewicz's photographs have been
published in many professional album collections and shown at
photographic exhibitions worldwide. Similary, Malinowski's "ethnographic"
photographs were part of his classical anthropological works.
Malinowski's pictures usually function - and are displayed - on
their own, as in Malinowski's Kirwina. Fieldwork photography
1915-1918, an album of previously unpublished Malinowski
photographs provided by the London School of Economics archives, was
authored by the ardent Malinowski biographer and scholar - professor
Michael Young
. Witkiewicz's and Malinowski's photographs function on their own:
Witkiewicz's as art, Malinowski's as
science.
The main idea behind our exhibition and
this unconventional catalogue - which is rather a book of
anthropological texts (known mainly to anthropologists) and
"Witkacy" texts (known chiefly to Witkiewicz specialists,
historians and art critics), was to bring the two together in one
volume and at a single display.
This might at first seem an usurpation - if
not for the fact that such a meeting of the two could considerably
refresh our approach to photography, science and art. And if so,
then the sphere of what is "between" may show itself as a
reality much more complex, deeper and more problematic than the
simple division into science and art to which we have become
accustomed.
Our aim also was to approach and portray
two outstanding personalities - the scholar and the artist. Both
eminent men - Malinowski, the scientist, who founded and became a
classic of today's cultural anthropology and Witkiewicz, artist,
painter, writer, dramatist and philosopher - were natives of
Galicia
. These were two outstanding men whose lives were tied to Zakopane
and
Cracow
and who left their mark on 20th-Century science and art.
The project would not have been possible
without the kind help we received from so many quarters. I therefore
wish to express my sincere thanks (also expressed separately
elsewhere) to the members of the Honorary Committee that took
patronage over the event and all institutions and persons who
supported us and contributed to our success. I also wish to extend
my particular gratitude to two women without whose assistance,
knowledge and commitment this exhibition would never have achieved
its form and dimensions: Mrs. Zofia Gołubiew, Director of Cracow's
National
Museum
and Mrs. Helena Wayne (Malinowska).
Without Mrs. Gołubiew's support of our
project, her help in its development, her personal authority, the
authority of the institution she heads and the professional
competence of her staff - with whom we had the pleasure to cooperate
- we could never have even dreamt of organising what amounts to the
second-ever exhibition of almost all of Witkiewicz's exotic Australian
landscapes, that are to be found in museums and private
collections in Poland — and certainly not alongside Malinowski's
photographs.
I especially wish to thank Mrs. Helena
Wayne (Malinowska) for providing us with photographs and documents
from her family archives - private photographs of biographical
import that gave the exhibition a personal note.
One can view the displayed photographs
through the prism of traditional divisions into scientific and
artistic photography (Malinowski's documenting of his ethnographic
work, Witkiewicz's experimental art/work and searching for artistic
form, his portraits resembling something like a painter's sketchbook).
The differences between "backgrounds" and "foregrounds",
between Europe and tropical
Asia
, between the faces of Europeans and Asian "savages",
between a scientist's photographs and those taken by an artist,
between science and art as such are all open to analysis. But one
can also look at them in a different way.
Their private, biographical content carries
the same strength that James Clifford described when writing about
the role of photography in anthropology: "You're there because
I (the photographer, neither scientist nor artist) was there"
(cf: p. 106).
Such emotions usually accompany the perusal
of private, "family" photos - and such is the atmosphere
surrounding the photographs on display at the exhibition.
To be there, photographically "in-between"
- and perhaps "beyond" - science and art, to view the
faces of men, women and children from the Trobriands, Australia,
England, Tirol, Zakopane and Cracow, the faces of Bronio, Staś,
Elsie and Mamie - is to see and discover the anthropological sense
and dimension of photographic testimony and the anthropological
dimension of the human condition: individual existence and unity in
diversity.
Translated by Maciej Bańkowski
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